The sound of the planet’s atmosphere hitting the hull thundered in Gwyn’s ears. The ship shook and rattled until she was sure something was going to fall off—no doubt something important—but it was holding. For now.

“Report!” Gwyn yelled.

“Hull temperature has peaked at approximately three thousand Kelvin,” chimed a voice in Gwyn’s ear, “estimated probability of you arriving safely on the planet’s surface is high.”

“Where’s the ‘but’, Carter?”

“The but is in the ship, Gwyn. You should arrive intact. I cannot say the same for the craft.”

“Fabulous,” Gwyn grunted, “let’s hope they have a repair yard.”

“Gwyn, this is a frontier colony that was seeded over four thousand years ago and has been dark for three and a half thousand years. We are unlikely to find anything more advanced than pointy sticks.”

“I was joking, Carter,” Gwyn said, “hold on to your circuit boards, we’re in the atmosphere.”

* * *

“When you said I should arrive intact,” Gwyn said a few minutes later, “I didn’t realise you meant without my ship.”

“If you had stayed onboard, you would now be a rather interesting pattern on the ground.”

“Thank you for that visual,” Gwyn sighed, “are you intact?”

“My remote processor in your implant is the only thing that survived the crash. You will have my company as long as your implant survives, but I no longer have access to my database.”

“The database that stored information like ‘how to tell if eating this alien mushroom will kill you’ kind of thing? That database?”

“Correct,” Carter said.

“Well,” Gwyn said, sitting heavily on a nearby rock, “given that my ship is currently molten slag, and even if it could be repaired every known human settlement has been snuffed out, we don’t have much choice but to-what the hell?”

Gwyn tumbled to the floor as the rock shifted underneath her. The rock resolved itself into a small creature with a thick hide, several nubs that looked like the early stages of horns, and mesmerisingly red eyes. The creature unfolded itself to about the size of a large dog, shook, and looked expectantly at Gwyn.

“It appears you have made a friend,” Carter said in her ear.

“Hello little guy,” Gwyn said cautiously, “sorry about sitting on you.”

The creature sniffed, plopped down, and set about cleaning itself.

“Might I suggest we leave this creature to his business?” Carter said. “It may have a much larger and less amiable parent nearby.”

Gwyn nodded, turned, and began walking. She might have been walking for a few minutes before a sound behind her caught her attention. She spun, pistol in hand, to find the creature a few feet behind her.

“No little guy, you can’t come with me,” she said, holstering her pistol.

It was a testament to the human capacity for empathy that even this creature, with its sickly green hue and jagged teeth, could still trigger something in Gwyn that made her want to care for it. She turned and continued walking.

* * *

Getting a fire going turned out to be more difficult than Gwyn had expected. Her pistol could easily set fire to wood with enough patience, but everything was damp and the flames refused to catch. In the end she’d had to use her pistol to dry the kindling. She warmed her fingers against the modest flame and flipped over the carcass of the squirrel she’d caught earlier that day.

Of course the planet had squirrels—they would have been part of the initial colony seed, and a few thousand years on a planet with a single continent was plenty of time for the little critters to get everywhere.

“Our friend is still out there,” Carter said, “I can hear him.”

Gwyn laughed. “You can hear him, yes. I can see him. Those eyes are like red beacons in the night." Gwyn lifted the greasy morsel gingerly off of the rock and broke a leg off. She tossed it into the darkness in the direction of the glowing red points of light. The darkness sniffed, licked, and ate.

“I think,” Carter said, “that we can assume our new friend doesn’t mind eating the bones.”

A few moments later, the creature shuffled into the light of the fire and sat beside Gwyn. She smiled, and broke off the other squirrel leg.

“We’ve befriended the locals,” Gwyn said, “what next?”

* * *

Kraton took a deep breath. His father was dead. His uncle was dead. The Hrinti had taken almost everything from him, but he would be damned if he’d let them take his wife and children.

His fingers gripped tightly around the shaft of his spear.

There were only three of them, now. He would almost certainly die, he knew, but he intended to take them with him. Even if he only wounded them, it would give his family a chance.

He prepared to leap.

A sudden crash stayed his feet. The surviving Hrinti started screaming, and a snarling filled the air. Then came a sound of tearing flesh, and another noise Kraton could not recognise. He peeked his head over the wall and saw…

…a gosbeast being ridden by a woman! The strangeness of this imagery was pushed aside when he realised that the woman was shooting light from her hand. The Hrinti fell quickly. The light from the woman’s hands knocked them down and the gosbeast set about them. Kraton ducked back down out of view.

He couldn’t get his thoughts together. He wanted to get his family and escape while the gosbeast was busy with the Hrinti, but he would never be able to sneak away on this flat plain, and no human could outrun a gosbeast. He turned once more to see what was happening.

When Kraton stuck his head up over the wall, the gosbeast was close enough that its breath caused him to flinch back.

“Go,” said the woman in a strange thick accent, “you and your family are safe.”

And the strange woman and beast were gone.